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Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Debunking the Myth of St. Francis as a Modern Ecumenist

Debunking the Myth of St. Francis as a Modern Ecumenist

A new film, “The Sultan and the
Saint,” apparently depicts Francis as a proponent of interreligious
dialogue, not as a bold preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There
is a famous story about St. Francis of Assisi meeting the Sultan of
Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. The poor Christian monk sought an
audience with the great Muslim leader al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219 to
talk about religion and try to agree on peace, the story often goes.
Today this episode is frequently used to portray St. Francis as a
peacemaker and proponent of interreligious dialogue.

For example, at
the Mass celebrating the feast of St. Francis this year, I heard a
homily in which the priest said St. Francis provides an example of
ecumenism with “our Muslim brothers and sisters” that is being
followed by Pope Francis. It was not the first time I’ve heard this
comparison.
It
is such a common story, in fact, it has become almost cliché, at
least among Franciscans and ecumenists: 750 years before the Second
Vatican Council, St. Francis anticipated the modern ecumenical
movement. Based on this story, one US Franciscan
website advises young Catholics to “Ask your parish youth
leader or your religious education teacher to organize a trip to a
local mosque. Talk with Muslims to better understand their faith and
pray with them.” But the historical record suggests that such a
reading is at best anachronistic, and probably completely
ahistorical. It is doubtful St. Francis had the modern idea of
ecumenism or interfaith dialogue in mind when he crossed the battle
lines and entered the sultan’s tent. What really happened at that
meeting in 1219, and what meaning does this encounter have for
Catholics and Muslims today?
A
new film, “The
Sultan and the Saint,” an independent production from Unity
Productions Foundation, is scheduled for release in November 2016
that dramatizes this tale. I came across an advertisement for the
film the in Secular Franciscan Order’s US national newsletter,
“TAU-USA,” requesting financial support to complete the film and
encouraging readers to see it. The Franciscan
Action Network has also enthusiastically participated in the
project and is helping to fund it.

An advertisement for the new film, from TAU-USA (Summer 2016, p. 21)

The
exact content and message of the film will only be revealed on
opening night. But based on the advertisement and related
documentation on the film’s webpage, it looks like there may be
good reason to question the film’s historical authenticity and the
validity of its interpretation of the meeting. For example, the
promotional materials cite specious “facts” about the crusades,
insinuating they were instigated by Christians for evil reasons, and
make the ungrounded claim that St. Francis “opposed the warfare.”
Advertising
from Xavier University says the meeting between the saint and
sultan “sucked the venom out of the Crusades,” as if the
Christians were wrong.
I
am not a historical or theological authority. I am just a guy who has
read about
the life of
St. Francis. Hopefully some real historians and experts will give a
thorough analysis of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. But the
sources I have consulted suggest that the message of this new film,
like the cliché of St. Francis “reaching out to Muslims” in a
gesture of ecumenism, is at best a distortion or misreading of
history, and at worst a flat-out lie. As
Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, notes in his acclaimed Francis of Assisi:
A New Biography (Cornell University Press, 2012), “while modern
writers often reconfigure it”—the meeting of Francis with the
Sultan—“as pacifistic, antiwar preaching, Francis’ real motives
seem very personal, not visionary or ideological.” As Fr Thompson
explains, Francis “skipped over the question about messages from
the leaders of the Crusade and got immediately to the point. He was
an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ and had come for the salvation
of the sultan’s soul. Francis expressed his willingness to explain
and defend Christianity.” Francis made it clear that he was willing
to die for his beliefs.

The
truth, then,
is that St. Francis’ purpose was to evangelize the Muslims. He was
inspired by God to preach the gospel to the sultan. He boldly,
bravely, and unapologetically proposed the truths of the Catholic
faith to him at great personal risk. He did so with respect –
peacefully, humbly, without denigrating or attacking Islam, and with
good will. In this sense, he is a good model for interreligious
dialogue today. It is vital for Catholics to be able to talk with
people of other faiths – to be able to share the gospel truth, to
be able to listen respectfully, and to look for common ground.

St.
Francis sought peace, yes – but not by means of political
negotiations or a legal treaty or by compromising his faith in
exchange for coexistence with Islam, but by converting the enemies of
the faith to Christianity. He did not dialogue with the sultan with
the limited aim of improving mutual understanding; he wanted to save
the sultan’s soul by offering him the Good News, or to die a
martyr’s death trying. And it was a reasonable expectation that he
would be killed for his faith, since a fundamental doctrine of Islam
both then and now is that Muslims are obliged to either kill,
convert, or totally subject all non-Muslims to Islam.

In
his classic book St.
Francis of Assisi: A Biography,
Omer Englebert tells us that immediately after returning from his
visit with the sultan, St. Francis learned that five Franciscan
brothers had been martyred in Morocco. While passing through Moorish
Spain they had entered a mosque and denounced the Koran. They told
the local ruler, “We have come to preach faith in Jesus Christ to
you, so that you will renounce Mohammed, that wicked slave of the
devil, and obtain everlasting life like us.” Hearing this report,
St. Francis exclaimed, “Now I can truly say that I have five Friars
Minor!”
St.
Francis was above all a faithful Catholic, a fact that is sometimes
missed by depictions of him as a modern ecumenist. In the First
Rule
of the Friars Minor (no. 19), he writes: “Let all the brothers be
Catholics, and live and speak in a Catholic manner. But if anyone
should err from the Catholic faith and life in word or in deed, and
will not amend, let him be altogether expelled from our fraternity.”
In his Letter
to All the Faithful
he advises, “We ought also to fast and to abstain from vices and
sins and from superfluity of food and drink, and to be Catholics. ...
And let us all know for certain that no one can be saved except by
the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the holy words of the Lord
which clerics say and announce and distribute and they alone
administer and not others.”
The
film’s advertising implies that the crusades were evil both in
intent and in practice. This is a common misconception used as a slur
against the Church. The lands around the Mediterranean were
predominantly Christian by the AD 700s. Most people there did not
convert to Islam voluntarily, but forcibly by Mohammed’s invading
armies. The idea of taking up arms to defend themselves against
Muslim expansionism – which was the basic motive of the Christian
crusades – was reasonable under such conditions.
Sadly,
the religious wars continued after the time of St. Francis. Over the
centuries there have been innumerable Muslim land and sea attacks,
with marauding and long-term occupations throughout Christendom. Some
major conflicts that come to mind include Kosovo in 1389,
Constantinople in 1453, Belgrade in 1521, Vienna in 1529, Hungary in
1526 and 1566, Lepanto in 1571, and Vienna again in 1683. Wars with,
and loss of territory to, the Ottomans continued for centuries as
they pushed relentlessly to impose Islam on Europe.
St.
Francis was a man of peace, but there is no evidence that he opposed
the crusades. The notion that the crusades were contrary to
Franciscan spirituality is belied by the fact that one leader of
later crusades was St. Louis IX, the king of France, a Franciscan
tertiary who is now patron saint of the Secular Franciscan Order.
Obviously, he and the Church saw no contradiction between Christian
faith and morals, or Franciscan principles, and fighting a war of
defense against Muslims. The Franciscan Poor Clare monastery in
Assisi was even attacked by Muslims in 1240 and successfully defended
by St. Clare herself.
In
the end, the record shows that St. Francis did make an
extraordinarily daring effort by reaching out to al-Kamil, which
resulted in a unique personal relationship between the two men. He
charmed the sultan with his simplicity and authenticity, and was
granted safe passage for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But his
“outreach” was a missionary attempt to propagate the faith, not
interfaith dialogue as it is typically conceived today. This
historical episode is often appropriated by the modernist ecumenical
movement which downplays or even rejects the Church’s mission to
evangelize. Zeal for souls and trust in providence were the core of
St. Francis’ spirituality and motivated his excursion to the
sultan. The advertising for the new film, “The Sultan and the
Saint,” suggests it presents revisionist history in line with the
modernist ecumenical agenda. We have to wait till it comes out to
know for sure.

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St. Bernard:

Go forth confidently then, you knights, and repel the foes of the cross of Christ with a stalwart heart. Know that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, and in every peril repeat, "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." What a glory to return in victory from such a battle! How blessed to die there as a martyr! Rejoice, brave athlete, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but glory and exult even more if you die and join your Lord. Life indeed is a fruitful thing and victory is glorious, but a holy death is more important than either. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more are they who die for the Lord!

How secure, I say, is life when death is anticipated without fear; or rather when it is desired with feeling and embraced with reverence! How holy and secure this knighthood and how entirely free of the double risk run by those men who fight not for Christ! Whenever you go forth, O worldly warrior, you must fear lest the bodily death of your foe should mean your own spiritual death, or lest perhaps your body and soul together should be slain by him.

Indeed, danger or victory for a Christian depends on the dispositions of his heart and not on the fortunes of war. If he fights for a good reason, the issue of his fight can never be evil; and likewise the results can never be considered good if the reason were evil and the intentions perverse. If you happen to be killed while you are seeking only to kill another, you die a murderer. If you succeed, and by your will to overcome and to conquer you perchance kill a man, you live a murderer. Now it will not do to be a murderer, living or dead, victorious or vanquished. What an unhappy victory--to have conquered a man while yielding to vice, and to indulge in an empty glory at his fall when wrath and pride have gotten the better of you!

But what of those who kill neither in the heat of revenge nor in the swelling of pride, but simply in order to save themselves? Even this sort of victory I would not call good, since bodily death is really a lesser evil than spiritual death. The soul need not die when the body does. No, it is the soul which sins that shall die.

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port.

Once he finds himself in the thick of battle, this knight sets aside his previous gentleness, as if to say, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord; am I not disgusted with your enemies?" These men at once fall violently upon the foe, regarding them as so many sheep. No matter how outnumbered they are, they never regard these as fierce barbarians or as awe-inspiring hordes. Nor do they presume on their own strength, but trust in the Lord of armies to grant them the victory.

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Saint Athanasius

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith?The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ..."You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day. "Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ."